SODP Dispatch - 31 March 2023

Happy Friday!

Let’s talk about story formats.

How important are formats to publishers? It’s about as broad and vague a question as anyone could ask.

Our managing editor, Andrew Kemp, shares his thoughts on the subject in his weekly Editor’s Note column:

I’ve been thinking about the importance of formats on and off for about a decade, ever since my years-long effort to convince my management team that we needed to stop designing our publications in Microsoft Word and switch to Adobe InDesign paid off.

Given our lack of in-house design talent (as hinted at by our dogmatic use of Word), we contracted a designer to both develop the various publication templates and teach us how to use them.

The difference in how the products looked was night and day and gave the editors more freedom to introduce new graphics and images that wouldn’t have been possible before. With that said, I still remember how surprised our designer was at our desire to upgrade our format, noting that publishers in general seemed relatively disinterested in investing in redesigns.

This lined up with my own experience of how long it took management to embrace change. And that’s why it was so interesting to read Anna Sofia Lippolis’ analysis last year of The Verge’s root and stem design facelift.

Continue reading

FROM STATE OF DIGITAL PUBLISHING

INSIGHTS

EXPANDING PUBLIC RADIO CAN HELP SOLVE THE LOCAL NEWS CRISIS

Since 2005, more than 2,500 local newspapers, most of them weeklies, have closed, with more closures on the way.

Responses to the decline have ranged from luring billionaires to buy local dailies to encouraging digital startups. But the number of interested billionaires is limited, and many digital startups have struggled to generate the revenue and audience needed to survive.

The local news crisis is more than a problem of shuttered newsrooms and laid-off journalists. It’s also a democracy crisis. Communities that have lost their newspaper have seen a decline in voting rates, the sense of solidarity among community members, awareness of local affairs and government responsiveness.

Largely overlooked in the effort to save local news are the nation’s local public radio stations.

Read more

SOCIAL MEDIA

8 TIKTOK CONTENT STRATEGIES FOR PUBLISHERS

The number of publishers embracing TikTok is on the rise as they attempt to appeal to younger audiences with their nigh insatiable demand for short-form video content.

News publishers in particular are trying to reach younger audiences, who have shown a lack of interest in traditional news channels.

TikTok reaches 40% of 18–24s across all markets, with 15% using the platform for news. While the platform’s role as a news provider trails other social media networks, such as Facebook and YouTube, it has grown its market share in this space rapidly in the past few years.

The opportunity to tap into this growing demand isn’t limited to news providers. Niche and evergreen publishers with the right TikTok content strategies also stand to benefit

Read more

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

TOOL

Identify dozens of entities and ontologies using Google's Knowledge Graph data, identify relationships between entities, and get insights into how search engines interpret content, and find hundreds of related entities that can potentially improve the performance of your content. Learn more

TIP

News SEO success factors that publishers should pay attention to in relation to:

• The audience

• Content

• HTML

BITE-SIZED INDUSTRY NEWS

SEOSeveral weeks ago, Google enabled the ability to export your Google Search Console data in bulk, automatically, to Google's BigQuery. Now, Google announced that you can do this across multiple properties in Google Search Console into a single Google Cloud project. Read more

AIBuzzFeed quietly started publishing fully AI-generated SEO-driven travel posts by non-editorial staff on March 14; a spokesperson calls the posts an experiment. Read more

SOCIAL MEDIATwitter launches its Verified Organizations program, which allows companies to get a verified checkmark for $1,000/month and their affiliates for $50/month each. Read more

BUSINESS MODELSubstack, a venture-backed subscription media platform popular with writers and known for its email service, has collected more than $5 million in pledges for an extension to its Series B from its community and the internet at large. Read more

SOCIAL MEDIAA new study found heavy Facebook users were far more likely to consume fake news than Twitter or other social media sites. Read more

ADVERTISINGGoogle is launching an ads library, it announced Wednesday morning. The tool, dubbed Google’s Ads Transparency Center, will let users see which ads an advertiser is running, in what regions they’re running, and the dates those ads ran. Read more

Copyright (C) Want to change how you receive these emails?You can update your preferences or unsubscribe